Searching for signatures of cosmic string wakes in 21cm redshift surveys using Minkowski Functionals

Abstract

Minkowski Functionals are a powerful tool for analyzing large scale structure, in particular if the distribution of matter is highly non-Gaussian, as it is in models in whichcosmic strings contribute to structure formation. Here we applyMinkowski functionals to 21cm maps which arise if structure is seeded by a scaling distribution of cosmic strings embeddded in background fluctuations, and then test for the statistical significance of the cosmic string signals using the Fisher combined probability test. We find that this method allows for detection of cosmic strings with Gμ > 5 × 10−8, which would be improvement over current limits by a factorof about 3.